Board Game Arena

Sounds like some sort of script, extension. Whatever you want to call it. Advantage yes. Cheat yes. Many games are hard to figure the scoring as it stands. With end of game scoring added in. Quite an advantage. Way to big. And especially if it works when game wants hidden scoring.

Shadek wrote: ↑04 August 2025, 11:52 no extensions on the phone, otherwise i would have agreed,

Advantage... yes, Cheating,..no..it doesn't show anything you cant figure out by counting

If this person is using a BGA functionality, we would be able to see what's in the screenshot when viewing a replay from their perspective. Do you have a specific game number where this is supposedly visible?

If they are not using a BGA functionality, then have you asked them where they got it? Whether you want to call it an "extension" or something else is really immaterial; if it's not something that uses the BGA framework no one here can tell you how to activate it in a game.

I don't imagine this is scoring on hidden things, especially if it is happening from browser side, which is unlikely to know about anything beyond the game state you can see. In Carcassonne, it's relatively easy to look at the board and see, oh, that player has 4 points from uncompleted roads, 5 points from an uncompleted city, 3 points from an uncompleted cathedral, and they have 2 farmers - this one will score 9 points, that one will score 12 points. Admittedly, you have to do that calculation for each player, but I would imagine most players who play regularly can look at a board and at least have a rough feel for that, if not calculate that quite quickly. I have friends who can easily remember cards played in a game, and yes, that gives them an advantage, but it's not cheating. Many games on BGA also give you the option of having scoring calculated as you go - Kingdom Builder for example, scoring is only supposed to be done at the end, but you can absolutely have BGA calculate the score as you go. That's not cheating, that's just a convenience. In many ways, it levels the playing field for all players, because as I said, some people can just do that in their head.

Being able to keep track of ongoing scoring is part of the skill of the game.

Having something that just does it for you, particularly with a contested complicated field layout, is akin to cheating in my opinion.

I am glad this is not built into BGA but I hope there is a way to block these kind of extensions that give an advantage